Rodrigo Claims Remarkable Brno Pole

Gabriel Rodrigo claimed the first pole position of his Grand Prix career in incredible circumstances at Brno. The Argentine recovered from a crash at the start of the qualifying session and a subsequent trip to the medical centre to snatch pole in the dying seconds, despite having hardly any running during the forty minutes.

This morning’s practice session had been punctuated by crashes and qualifying began in similar fashion as Nicolo Bulega, the fastest man in FP3, took a tumble. Rodrigo was the next to go down with the RBA rider tangling with home favourite Jakub Kornfeil at the final corner. While Jakub continued back to the pits, Gabriel was forced to visit the medical centre without having registered a lap time.

Elsewhere, Romano Fenati was dominating the session having clocked a 2:09.218 early on but the traditional late rush was set to shake up the order. Juanfran Guevara, who was thought to be RBA’s only hope for pole position, leapt to the top of the leaderboard with ten seconds remaining but Fenati responded immediately, seemingly securing pole.

However, no-one had bargained for Rodrigo who set his first timed lap of the entire session as the chequered flag flew, setting a 2:08.571 to pip Fenati by a tenth of a second. Guevara held onto third, ensuring that the RBA squad will have both riders on the front row of the grid tomorrow. Championship leader Joan Mir starts fourth ahead of Bulega who shrugged off his own crash to take fifth with Bo Bendsneyder rounding out the second row.

Marcos Ramirez will go in search of a second consecutive podium from seventh with Fabio Di Giannantonio and Livio Loi alongside while Philipp Oettl completes the top ten.